IT Consulting from the Trenches

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR IT PRIORITIES WISELY

I ran recently across photos of co-workers from my early days in IT. We got in touch and over a cold one we reminisced about how the IT function has changed. The IT discipline has matured. Fifteen years ago IT’s primary function was to keep systems up and running. Today, that’s taken for granted. Today, IT performance is judged by the results it contributes towards the parent organization's goals. The measure of an effective IT manager is how s/he uses resources to satisfy the organization’s goals.

FIRST, PUT THE HOUSE IN ORDER

Among the first things an incoming IT manager must know are the expectations by the parent business of IT. Armed with that knowledge, he must assess the IT organization's capabilities and identify any gaps between what is expected and what can be delivered. He must perform a gap analysis in short.

Next, the analysis results should be prioritized. The priorities came from the business managers and are the same expectations he learned earlier. The outcome of this step is a prioritized list of the processes and activities that need to be improved.

KEEP THE CORPORATE CULTURE IN MIND

Any good marketing management book will explain at least three ways that companies differentiate themselves in the marketplace. They can position themselves as the best in:

• Customer responsiveness

They excel at staying close to their customers. They can anticipate their customer needs more quickly.

• Product or service innovation

They provide the latest and greatest. Their products or service speak for themselves.

• Operational efficiency

They have the most efficient operations. Their efficiency means that they can sell you their goods and services at the least possible cost.

A former employer, Shared Medical Systems (SMS), is a good example of a company whose corporate focus was on exceptional customer responsiveness, the first item above. This was SMS’s competitive strength. That strength was emphasized at the cost of product innovation though. SMS has never been known for devising the most efficient solutions. Their solutions tended to be evolutionary improvements of existing products and, sometimes, that wasn’t enough. In my team’s area of responsibility-the Great Lakes region and Central Canada-I know we lost several accounts because our competitors were able to introduce superior solutions. This was SMS corporate culture though—conservative but steady and sure. This mindset had served them well. Founded in 1969 by three IBM salesmen, SMS provided time-sharing services to hospitals. Three decades later, SMS had grown to become the largest IT service provider for the healthcare industry. Siemens, the German conglomerate, acquired SMS in 2000. It turned SMS into the core component of its medical division, and renamed it Siemens Medical.

It was a wrenching change. Our regional VP—the highest-ranking officer at our regional office—had his title changed to… Senior Manager.

At any rate, the digression was meant to illustrate the importance of knowing the corporate culture of the parent organization in planning the IT functions.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BUSINESS PROCESSES AND IT SYSTEMS

Business processes are supported by IT systems. Let’s understand that first. Consider this example of a business process:

In any modern supermarket, when it’s time to check out, you select a line and then place the items you’re buying on the conveyor belt. Once the items reach the cashier, she scans each piece and the item's description and price appears on the display terminal. That’s a business process. Behind it is information technology and clearly, the process is enabled or can only work through IT. The scanned bar code is converted into the data that is the item’s description and price. This data is pushed back to the cashier’s terminal which then displays it for both customer and cashier to see and verify.

¿SIX SIGMA OR NARROW CRITICAL GAPS?

A fast growing company doesn’t have much time to focus on improving its business processes. That task of improving its processes can’t be ignored in the long-term however. In a normal process transformation, the focus would be on the process side while IT adapts to the changes. In hospitals-this is the industry I’m most familiar with-processes have become more tightly integrated with IT. Consequently, process improvements require simultaneous improvements in IT systems. This holds true twice over for hospitals. The aging baby boomers have put healthcare on the fast track and hospitals are incorporating technology into its operations to just keep up.

In my opinion, this was the reality that our corporate did not or chose not to see. Our customers-at least the dynamic ones-were fast-tracking changes. For example, Six Sigma was in vogue with management during those days but Six Sigma is a change methodology that is very detail-oriented. Changes occur incrementally and, therefore, slowly. That’s fine if you’re fine-tuning a process. Six Sigma, however, is impractical to the point of actually being detrimental if you're making major changes to a process.

Our more dynamic customers adopted a different approach that I thought was more effective. They would work on the top three process capability gaps. Hospital administrators define these gaps differently. A growing hospital will choose gaps that hamper the business from scaling up (i.e., expanding). Narrowing those gaps deliver more immediate and observable results.

A typical hospital has a very uneven workflow pattern. A bottleneck occurs almost daily in the Emergency Room. Apart from being dangerous to the patients, it exposes the hospital to greater legal risk and it threatens the critical revenue-generating process. Clearly, this is a problem area.

A results-driven organization demands tangible contributions from IT (or any other business function) in short-term cycles. For example, if this year’s goal is to streamline the uneven workflow, hospital administrators may want to see tangible improvements every 90 days.

This kind of pressure makes communication and the task of change management very important. The IT manager must be able to explain his roadmap as well as progress and challenges regularly.

Generally speaking, any system that closes the care-giving loop between the patient and doctor or coordinates the different clinical departments better is desirable. And if the system gives the hospital a competitive edge then it becomes all that much better and more important to implement.